August 15, 2017 –A Marblehead businessman is asking the federal government to pay his attorney’s fees after being cleared of what he described as “being framed” by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Robert Kliss and his company North Atlantic Traders Ltd. was indicted in April, after a nearly five-year investigation. He was charged with smuggling, falsifying records and conspiracy.
In July, it took a jury only about an hour to clear him of all charges.
“This is a case the government never should have brought,” said Kliss’s Attorney Barry Pollack.
“I would have to say it was probably the most stressful thing I’ve very gone through,” Kliss said. “More so than an IRS audit and I’ve been through three.”
The Motion
In his motion for an award of attorney’s fees, which was filed in U.S. District Court Aug. 9, Pollack lays out all the ways the government’s case went wrong, including pressuring witnesses to, in some cases, exaggerate testimony and in one case invoke the Fifth Amendment.
Three cooperating witnesses pled guilty to a misdemeanor, “as the result of a hybrid charge and fact bargaining,” Pollack stated in his motion. “The government paid substantial consideration, in that respect, to each witness while pressuring him to provide testimony against Kliss.”
One of the most damning pieces of evidence against the government’s case however was when Agent Shawn Eusebio testified that during the more than four-year active investigation, no one on the government’s team realized Kliss wasn’t even in the country during the time he was alleged to have created and filed false documents in Massachusetts. Kliss had been in British Columbia with his son.
“My evidence was my stamped passport along with my son’s,” Kliss said. “That’s how bad the investigators and (prosecuting) attorneys are.”
Read the full story at the Marblehead Reporter
Read a statement from Stephen Ouellette, an attorney for North Atlantic Traders, here
